Roughly sixteen metres across, it exists primarily as a cropmark, a ghostly outline that only becomes legible from above, when differences in soil moisture and depth cause crops growing over a buried ditch to ripen at a slightly different rate to those around them. The result, visible on satellite imagery, is a faint but distinct ring pressed into the agricultural landscape like a watermark.

What the cropmark reveals is a ring-ditch, a type of circular enclosure defined by a wide ditch, or fosse, cut into the ground. Ring-ditches are commonly associated with prehistoric funerary or ritual activity, often the surviving trace of a burial mound whose earthen material has long since been ploughed away, leaving only the encircling ditch below the surface. The Ballyredding example, approximately two metres wide at the fosse, is modest in scale, but that modesty is part of what makes it interesting. It was not found through excavation or formal field survey but was identified and reported by Jean-Charles Caillère, who recognised the telltale circular shadow in satellite imagery, including imagery captured on Google Earth Pro in June 2017.